With the development of the Ethernet towards a carrier-grade Ethernet, since an OAM function was added to the Ethernet technology system as an important characteristic of a carrier-grade network, the Ethernet OAM has also become an essential feature of the carrier-grade Ethernet.
FIG. 1 is a schematic view of maintenance domains (MDs) of the Ethernet OAM in the prior art. One Ethernet OAM architecture may include MDs at different levels and may also include multiple MDs at the same level. The MD is a network domain for implementing the OAM function. The Ethernet OAM architecture as shown in the figure includes a customer domain, a provider domain, and several network operator domains, for example, operation domains A, B, and C.
The same end-to-end connection may involve multiple MDs at different levels. For each connection, OAM property information such as an MD endpoint, an MD intermediate point, and an MD level, needs to be configured for each MD involved in the connection. In the prior art, the OAM property of each node needs to be configured by a network manager manually. As a result, if a large number of connections exist in the domain or an end-to-end connection involves a large number of nodes, the network manager has a large configuration task load and needs to configure a corresponding OAM property for each node to be configured. It can be seen that, the existing method for configuring OAM properties has a low efficiency.